How the left is silent and free speech. She is joining conversation by jenny thomas, contributor to the daily news foundation. Government abuse is usually onesided. I think theres a couple of reasons for this. When i started this i cared about free speech and the first amendment. Amendment. A bit of a libertarian when it comes to this. I have no allegiance to one party or the other. I went into this, i had written a lot about the abuses of the left in my column in the wall street journal but i assumed going in that i was going to find a bunch of stuff on the right to. I didnt. On sunday, indepth live with author and legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin will take your calls, text and email questions from new3 00 p. M. Eastern. They will be discussing the latest book, american heiress, the wild saga of the kidnapping, crimes, and trial of patty hearst. Mr. Toobin is the author of the oath, the Obama White House and the supreme court. Denied inside the secret world of the supreme court. Too close to call, the 36 day battle to decide the 2000 election. A vast conspiracy the real scandal to bring down a president. The run run of his life, the people, the o. J. Simpson. An opening arguments, a Young Lawyers first case, United States versus oliver north. Join the conversation with your phone calls and tweets. Beginning at noon at noon eastern. Bennett seven eastern we look at the impact that Hillary Clinton presidency would have on america on in his book, Hillarys America the secret history of the democratic party. Go to booktv. Org for the complete we can schedule. This week on q a, author Scott Christiansen discusses his book 100 documents that change the world. In the magna carta to wiki leaks. Scott christiansen, what did you want to do with this book, 100 documents that change the world . I wanted to whet readers appetites for documents, historic documents that really have change the world. And to the world. And to show people what the actual documents look like and to explain a little bit to the context of those objects. A little bit of the story behind them and to put them together over time in a Chronological Order to give people a sense of how they played out in history. How did you decide which hundred to put in . Guest it was very difficult. I work with a publisher in london and while i am doing the writing the text, they are getting images. We work back and forth and we will work on the list together, they suggest things, i suggest things, we come, we come to agreements and in some cases it is a later refined and others are substituted for various reasons. It is a process that is ongoing. It really started when i set out with some members of my family including a very smart, young boy. I asked him, what you think of the 100 most Important Documents in history and he rattled off like 75 of the ones that happen to be in the book. Cspan how old was he . Guest he was only 14 years old, he is a nephew. The i ereforink tim and my acknowledgments and his parents for their contribution. Cspan how did he know 75 of these . Guest he is a reader of history. He studies history, he loves history, he has a very wide ranging interest in history. And encyclopedic knowledge of history. It was with his good graces that i came up with this list. Cspan if you had to pick one in this book that is in your mind the most important, what would it be . Guest i have a preference for the gutenberg bible. The gutenberg bible which Everybody Knows the term but they dont completely understand the significance of it, it was created in the 1450s 50s by a printer blacksmith in germany. He had a staff of 20 people, he was a very highly skilled artisan. He set out to print a new copy of the bible using movable metal type which was something that had never been done before. And that was with a project of that size. At that that time, there is only about 30,000 books in all of europe. It took years for scribes to copy one to make one bible. So he gathered his people together, they use very high quality paper and what was used it took over 150 just for one bible. They made 180 copies, a very wonderful product and sold it for a very high price. It revolutionized printing and a world of books. You write that scholars today think be between hundred 50 copies were printed of which 48 have survived. Have you seen one of these yourself . Guest ive not seen an actual copy closeup. I have seen copies and video another images from the gutenberg bible. It is really an extraordinary, magnificent creation. That now a complete copy goes for Something Like 35 million. Cspan why do people pay that kind of money for these candid documents . Guest i suppose if you have that kind of money you are a collector and you have some particular reason for its. Maybe you are somebody who is involved in publishing, books or religion, but i think very few people can afford that kindest thing or institutions that can afford that kind of price for such work. So there very few, very highly priced and extremely expensive. They were expensive were expensive when they are made at the time but today, they have grown up value a bit. Cspan when did you get your personal interest in this . Spee2 i got my my personal interest in documents because i had a very career. I was an Investigative Reporter, i worked for governments in several positions in government involving criminal justice in the long. Im a social scientist and particularly a criminologist and i am a documentary filmmaker and i have been involved in curating documentary exhibitions. Also of course i am an author and have written many books,. Cspan how many books . Guest it depends on how you count them, probably over 20 books. In the course of doing this i have worked very closely with documents my entire career. As a a writer today we spent our whole life curating documents, moving documents run, archiving documents, we have a very different conception today of what a document is. So much so that i believe we live in the age of documents today. Cspan where were you an Investigative Reporter . Guest i was in albany, new york. The capital of new york. It was a wash and corruption, a glorious corruption, glorious place to be an Investigative Reporter back in the late 60s and early 70s. We have Nelson Rockefeller as governor. And we had a local kennedy style political machine those very juicy. I had a great time as an Investigative Reporter starting out at that place. Cspan it has nothing to change much. Guest it has not changed much. Cspan the former speaker and former majority leader. Guest the beat goes on. Cspan where were you in government . Guest i worked under three governors of new york state. I worked primarily for the governor caldwell in a series of criminal justice positions. I worked from the 70s through the 80s and into the 90s while i was completing my doctoral work. After i have worked for the universities, im also a a teacher and ive taught at several universities. Cspan one of the last documents out of the 100 was from 2013, and it is Edward Snowdens files. , what is this piece of paper here that you have photograph . Guest that is a letter that Edward Snowden wrote making it available to various people in the media and members of government in which she attested to the fact that he had acquired this information. He worked as a Government Contractor and work for various government agencies. He attained a great deal of information which she believed showed that the government of the United States was involved in illegal gathering of information, intelligence information from the massive people who were spying on government officials abroad and in very large measure doing a number of things that horrified many people when it was want to be disclosed. He believed it was his duty as a patriot to disclose this information and said that he thought disclosing the truth was not a crime. A question that other people have disagree. He was such cents charge with theft of Government Property in violation of espionage act and he remains a fugitive and asylum in russia. Cspan here he is in 2014. It doesnt stop with phone calls. It covers inking your texmex is, every every Google Search you ever made and every plane ticket you have ever bought. The books you buy on amazon. Com anything that is unencrypted in anything whether this any other form can collect and store for increasing. Of time. Now people who say this is unconstitutional. [inaudible] but the policies that change with every president , with every new director of the nsa really address the threat that in several country nonoauds before you write in your book the full extent of the disclosures are no but you as intelligent a sources the number of files at one point, 7 million. What is your opinion of this . Guest it certainly is enormous and demands information. There has to be some scrutiny and exercise him part of the media in terms of what information is disclosed to make sure it does not endanger the lives of people. It really does perform a Vital Public Service and i know that it remains a very controversial, theres why live criticism was distorted. There is also a very strong feeling that he is an american hero. He is viewed as such from around the world. It does really cause people to question who controls documents, who who owns documents, what is the power of documents, what are these things really about. Cspan let me ask you for another one of your most Important Documents that you have in here. Guest well i think there certainly many types of documents. Im interested and i have given enough 1984 George Orwells book, 1984 and you, 1984 and you get a look at the manuscript of 1984 to see what it actually look like as he was making his final changes and about ready to retype it. Its very interesting thing to me that of course the work that he said big brother is watching. He really depicted a totalitarian state that could be a writer leftwing totalitarian state but he was warning people about either variety. In the course of writing this book he had a very tough time economically, his wife died during the course unexpectedly, his home in london was destroyed by a rocket bomb. He was very old, he almost died in a drowning accident. He was fighting tuberculosis. In addition to that as he was writing more and more about this totalitarian state he was becoming more and more paranoid. Cspan you say and that is usually just one page for an essay on each of these documents that the surviving manuscript of the novel is that the nonuniversity library and you have afforded graph of it here. How did you get this photograph . Guest all of these require approval from the institution, the library, the archive that holds them. There are very few examples of the manuscript of orwells work that are available. But this this particular one was contributed to Brown University by a alumnus. Cspan someone who talked about George Orwell all the time was late Christopher Hitchens. Lets watch what he says. Ive been in this career, and one hopes to avoid cliches im going to try not to mention 1984. But everyone says in fact the great thing about it is a cliche. The same year that 1984 came out its as if someone gave him the novel in korea. And said do you think wilshire given our best our best shot. Did you read it . Guest most early. I think every kid that grew up in the 1960s red 1984 and animal form. I have read it since its a great work and Christopher Hitchens of course was a great writer. Cspan where do you do your work from . Spee2 i presently live in the berkshires of massachusetts. I spent many years in upstate new york. I work at home, fulltime writer. And thats what i do. Thats i work on books, articles, films, films, many different types of projects. Cspan how long did it take you to put this together . Guest i can do think that every book takes a writer his or her whole life to produce. Its not something that people just toss off casually. You have to learn how to write a book, it takes training to do that and you have to learn a lot. So it takes times to physically produce and type it. In this particular book i took some that was as long as 25 years or 18 years of work. This book was just a few months. Cspan im actually working from the back to the front. There is a 2001 documents and bin laden determined to strike us and heres the document, what is is it . Guest on august 6, 2001 there is a president ial Daily Briefing to president bush at his ranch in crawford, texas. It was being delivered by a woman by woman by barber suit who was a cia analyst specializing in al qaeda. Prior to that time the new president , george w. Bush had received 40 or more warnings about al qaeda and what al qaeda was up to and this particular one really said many things. Warning about al qaeda being determined to attack the United States, their interest in aircraft, specifically specifically cited washington and new york, the World Trade Center. It said that was a rather urgent situation. Of course when this was a disclosed in the 9 11 hearings it costs a bit of a stir. People were pretty much overlooked the fact that there had been these other 40 previous warnings as well. The bottom line line is, the Bush Administration really did not respond to it, very lackadaisical he responded by lisa rice and other government officials and of course the United States was attacked on september eleventh, 2001. 2001. That has really changed our history. Cspan back in 2004 Condoleezza Rice testified before congress and heres counsel richard crossexamining her. Isnt it a fact to doctor rice, that the august 6 pdb warned against possible attacks in this country . I ask you whether you recall the title of that pdb . I believe the title was a bin laden determined to attack inside the United States. Now. It thank you. Know i would like to finish my point here. You asked me whether not it warned of attack. I asked you what the title was. You said did it warn of attacks . It did not warn of attacks inside the United States. It was Historical Information based on older reporting. There is no new threat information and it did not affect warn of any coming attacks and said the United States. When you hear that today, what is your reaction . Guest mumbojumbo. There were repeated warnings. Of crows crows what is the government to do in response to these and vague threats without specific information. What do you do . But i do remember that very time being down in the area of the World Trade Center anoint a number of strange individuals walking on taking pitchers and i just had a feeling of unease at that time. I worked at the World Trade Center previously, is is where the previous attack in the 1990s. It made me very uneasy. Of course there is not a response, John Ashcroft was the attorney general at the time was asked to approve 400 more fbi counterintelligence agents. He refused to do that. In a lot of ways the Bush Administration really blew off these warnings and did not respond until suddenly the attack occurred. Cspan one of your 100 is the Apple Computer company. What is it . Guest in 1976, three young fellows in silicon valley, california got together and decided they were going to create a small venture by the skin of their teeth with very little money and the garage of one of these young men. Theyre going to try to manufacture the computers, computer parts and they formed this Company CalledApple Computer. You may have heard of it. Since that time of course it is become one of the most successful businesses in world history. But it was really done on a shoestring and is short. Of time ago. Unfortunately. Fortunately for one of these partners, mr. Way, in this document he signed over his interest in the original Partnership Agreement for a poultry 800. Cspan after he this. Its amazing. Wozniak and jobs agreed to pay and delivered to wayne, as their sole obligations under the term of this amendment, the sum of 800. Does that mean that is all he god . Guest that is all he got. Cspan how available is this document, where you find Something Like this . Guest some of these things are available by the company. Theyre very interested and proud of this, their associations yet that make some of these kinds of things available. Historians and others. In all of these cases it involves a search. I believe believe this one came from apple itself. Cspan go back to the 13yearold that you talk to, what is his name . Spee2 his name is joel gardner. Cspan where does joel live . Spee2 he lives in hastings, done in hastings, done in the Hudson Valley of outside of new york city. Cspan was his reaction when he found out he named three quarters of the documents . Guest he was i really that interested. He was off 3d reading more history. Cspan did you give him one of your books . Guest a day, gave him them one of the books and i let him know and let his family know that ines grabbed it and dedicated it to him. Maybe someday it wi